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XXIX. ON THE RUN, ROME’S UNDERGROUND WORLD
You land hard, all three of you. The horses and soldiers pass in rapid order someplace behind and overhead. The glow of torches grows and then fades with their passing. Some of the main streets here actually have street lights, more to prevent crime than to light the way for late shoppers, but the thousands of little alleys are only lit by either moonlight or the casual flicker of a kitchen oven or a smith’s furnace damped down for the night.
You are in an alley that would put the worst London rookeries of Dickens’ time to shame. You have arrived in the underbelly of ancient Rome. This is where the offal meets the awful, and it gets worse yet. Already you see dark shapes ahead. A knife rises and falls, a man groans, a body falls, and feet run. Simultaneously, you hear the rip of leather and you know they’ve taken his purse with them. You hear laughter and yelling all around, doors slamming, pots rattling, babies squalling, dogs barking, cats meowing, a parrot screaming, more men yelling, women screaming in fear or pain or livid rage. Solid objects thwack on flesh. More yelling, more doors slamming, dice rolling on mosaic floors, ah this must be the entrance to hell. Surely Dante and Virgil came this way and quickly left. Trembling, you and Darwin and Amalthea feel your way forward. You find the unfortunate man lying unconscious on the cobblestone gutter, next to a sidewalk just wide enough for a thin dog to pass before eating a light lunch, but not after. You bend over the man, find a pulse, while Felix bangs on the nearest wooden door. The door opens a crack and a woman’s square, angry red face appears framed in filthy gray hair. Her eyes almost glow red like a demon’s. "What do you want, brigands?"
You explain about the man, and several thin sicarii (knifemen, from sicus, ‘knife’) stealthily ooze from the doorway looking right and left—they could be the robbers for all you know—lift the unconscious man, take him inside, and slam the door in your face. A pot of nightsoil comes flying and splatters over the street, barely missing you, though you catch a whiff and cry out in horror. Can you go home now? Alas, this adventure is just beginning to get lively.
"Let’s get out of here," Felix suggests tensely, and the three of you hasten blindly through a maze of alleys. Up and down, bumpty-bump, goes the path, always curving either right or left, never going straight. On either side are shuttered doors and windows. You pass a torch-lit street corner where a one-eyed boy roasts chestnuts and fish guts over a small brazier. It’s almost a barbecue smell, except the charcoal smells like urine as it sourly burns and emits foul yellow smoke. Around him stand a collection of thin, dangerous looking men in tunics, sipping wine and looking about. Their eyes are black and razor-like, undressing you to look for your wallet or the coins in the hidden folds of your tunic. Several women detach from the shadows and move into the light. They offer lecherous come-ons, parting their robes to reveal splotchy nudity. They are lacking an eye, teeth, hair, part of a jaw. One Germanic looking blonde is beautiful on one side of her face, and hideous on the other, with broken teeth visible through a serrated hole in her cheek. The men see easy prey and move forward in a semicircle while the women melt back into the shadows.
"Oh God," Darwin says. You add: "What I wouldn’t give for a fully loaded Uzi right now, or a Kalashnikov with a banana clip." Amalthea adds: "I’d settle for an M-16 on rock ‘n roll. But wait, I think we’ll be okay."
At that moment, a figure becomes visible on the street further ahead. The sicarii, and you, notice him at the same time. It is the cloaked man with the tall staff and the broad-brimmed petasus, the pilgrim’s hat. He looks so dark, so ominous, as he silently walks toward you, that everyone freezes. Silence falls, leaving only the noises coming muffled from beyond house walls. "He’s walking on air," says one of the sicarii. They all bolt in a single drum roll of feet. Their women melt further into the walls or wherever they dwell, and you seize the opportunity to run as fast as you can toward the stranger whose vision has saved you. He seems to vanish, or did he step to one side past a corner?
You don’t stop to investigate who he might be, or where he went. Your path takes you scrambling over pitch-black rubble, over garbage dumps, where the carcasses of dogs rot amid the refuse of the poorest section of the city. You pass taverns where the air smells of sour wine and is raucous with the laughter of slaves and cut-throats. "Where are we going?" you ask at one point.
"Back toward the northeastern sector, toward the Praetorian Guard barracks and Ulpian’s palace," Amalthea says breathlessly.
Darwin has to stop and rest several times. Gradually you make your way to a lighted street, the Via Sacra. You’re in the Scaurian Slope, a district on the west side of the Caelian Hill. The street itself is a veritable sea of light as wagons rumble past. Cargo traffic isn’t allowed on the streets by day, so the haulers come in by night and leave by morning. Everything from wine and beer, to wheat and rice, to kegs of garum and vinegar and cheese, dried fish and meat, fresh bread, rattles by here at night. The urban cohorts are busy like big city cops anywhere. Some are on foot patrol, others mounted. They always travel in packs for their own safety. If a patrol gets in trouble, they have trumpets and whistles to summon help. That’s not much different from Manhattan before the callbox, when cops used cherry wood nightsticks, which they’d rattle on the sidewalk to make a ringing sound. To add to the tumult, there is always a fire blazing somewhere in the city. The firemen, or vigiles, number in the thousands and could respond on short notice. They include sifonarii, men who work pumping apparatus, and uncinarii, men with grappling hooks scarily similar to weapons used in the arena. The local citizenry are expected to help, and a generous supply of buckets are available; as are centomes, blankets that can be wetted and used to stifle flames. Rome is a city with virtually no building codes, and what codes exist are widely ignored. The sprawling tenements (insulae) may burn or they may collapse, and then the lawyers and insurance agents get busy. More than one man has made a fortune by running immediately to such disasters, making a big show, lamenting the dead and maimed, and buying their possessions for a pittance for resale, or even buying the ruined property from its owner, and thus confusing their liabilities with clever lawyers in the fora (courts).
"Hey!" an officer cries, pointing your way. "Those three—aren’t they the ones wanted by the Quaestor Querculus?"
As hobnailed boots come tramping your way, you duck down another dark alley and run as fast as you can. You come to a dimly lit cross-street, barely ten feet across, in which a lantern burns in a grating above an arched door. (Such lanterns are maintained by a corps of sebaciarii, lamplighters.) Upper stories overhang on all sides, blocking the moonlight. You gasp for breath and listen for sounds of pursuit. You hear shouting and pounding on doors in a nearby street, so you know that you have at least temporarily thrown off your pursuers. "This place looks familiar!" Darwin says, sniffing the air. "I should say, smells familiar."
You point to a glistening slime on the streets. "Isn’t this where we were an hour ago?"
"We’ve gone in a circle," Felix says.
"Hey!" says a man’s voice and you all jump. He steps forth, a small man in a yellow tunic with brown borders on the sleeves. "I’m Frontinus. You saved my father earlier when he was accosted by sicarii." He sees your fear and confusion. "Don’t be afraid. I’ll help you. Where are you going?"
"We have been wrongly accused of crimes," Darwin tells him in a friendly but authoritarian voice. "We need to reach the villa of Ulpian, where we can explain our situation."
Frontinus, who has a bit of scoliosis—his body looks twisted, with one shoulder higher than the other—nods. He has short dark hair and friendly brown eyes in a pleasant face. "I’ve heard the outcry. It’s some trumped up charge of Carinus’ men. We all know the symptoms here in the poor sections of town, and we protect each other—all but the worst criminals know the score. Come, I’ll help you."
Frontinus guides you with the sureness of a man who has dwelt in these twisted streets all his life. "I am a coppersmith," he says a bit breathlessly. You see the burn marks from hot metal on his hands, and you wonder if the heat of the brazier has seared his lungs, for he puffs as he walks. "I am grateful that you saved my father. We live in a back court, and the people in the tavern in front are pretty nasty, but they brought him in and we revived him with wine and smelling salts." After a little while, you come to a small temple. "This is the Mithraeum of the Caelia," Frontinus says. He knocks, and a man in a short wool tunic answers. The man has a shaven head and wears a loose hood. "This is the temple slave, Marius."
Marius bows. "Ave, Magistri. A pleasant evening to you." Frontinus lays out the situation, and Marius makes cooing noises. His eyebrows ride up and down on his forehead, and his eyes have a mocking glitter. "The Quaestor wants these, for what? To disembowel them? Have they hidden their deceased mother’s silver in the yard?" He cackles at his own joke. Emperor Carinus’ vileness is legendary, though nowhere as extreme as the debaucheries of Heliogabalus for example (who used to prostitute himself to the rudest, drunkenest men in this very quarter, and ordered his doctors to cut an artificial vagina into his privates, with unknown result—no matter, he was murdered 222 in the Praetorian Guard camp, and his body thrown into the Tiber like offal). At least Carinus is a capable administrator and general, though he cannot keep his hands off his very generals’ wives and daughters.
"Good luck!" Frontinus says as he heads back, and Marius leads you into the secret underground world of the Taurobolium at night. It’s a mysterious world, like a stone cavern, and there is the faintest smell of spoiled meat or blood in the air. The initiates of Mithras are one of the closest competitors of Christianity. Mithraism is a favorite of soldiers, whereas Christianity is more commonly regarded as being for slaves, women, the unfit, and all sorts of dark spirits who hide in the catacombs outside the city at night doing Hercules knows what by candlelight. Like the Christians, the Mithraists celebrate an agape, or holy meal. Like the cult of Sol Invictus, their worship involves a sun-god. Mithras has roots all over the ancient east—from India, to Persia (especially the Zoroastrians, who contributed to early monotheistic ideas among the Jews), Babylonians and Chaldeans, and ultimately some Greek philosophical elements. Mithras receives the glowing nimbus or halo of the sun. He captures a wondrous bull, and piously, reluctantly, slaughters this bull in a sacred cave or specus. The bull’s blood causes all sorts of wonderful plants to spring up, particularly wheat and grapevines (which are symbols the Christians use, as do the worshipers of Bacchus and Ceres, and others). You’ve heard it all before: the sacrifice-death-descent into hell-return to life mystery of the sacred wheat kernel, whose holiness was discovered as far back as the Stone Age. The Mithras worshipers prefer dark and gloomy places to reenact their rites, though like Zoroastrians they also use light in their rituals. The specus, or mithraeum, resembles the dark womb of the earth, attended by the sun, the moon, and the stars, all of whom offer their light in the process of making the worshipers born again.
Marius leads you through a long underground passage that is lit by oil lamps set in wall sconces. "Touch nothing," he warns as you pass a stone altar where the sacrificial slaughter is offered in a symbolic form using bread and wine. Graved in the side of the altar is an image of Mithras as a young shepherd wearing a flopping Phrygian cap while he draws blood from the bull’s neck. There is also a baptismal font nearby. You see a wealth of paintings and carvings filled with symbolisms, but Marius hustles you quickly through.
At the far end, he passes you along to a parishioner of the mithraeum, who leads you without questions or conversation to another mithraeum several blocks away, and thence to a building that looks like a tiny temple above ground. In fact, buildings dedicated to water deities are known as nymphea and invite the veneration of Nereids, Naiads, and Oceanids. These are associated with sweet clear water in natural fountains and springs. This nymphaeum is no exception—it has devotions to certain water deities in its inner wall niches, but it is essentially a station of the Roman water system. Here you come into the hands of one Scipio the Waterman. Like many poor people in the anonymous bowels of the city, he is a freedman descended from manumitted slaves who would have been better off remaining slaves. Scipio has but one name, which his ancestors borrowed from somewhere, reflecting one of the great old family names of the Roman nation, but he has no personal connection to the Scipio clan whatsoever. His nickname, Aquifer, refers to his rather strange function. Rome has enormous aqueducts, some of which tower three or four stories above the ground, and are among the tallest buildings. They are a strange sight that has no parallel in any modern city you know of, these tall, thin structures that are half archways, half open air. Some have water channels running on two or three levels, going to different receiving stations. The water supply is to Rome as the power supply would be to a modern city. It is the city’s greatest utility, and thousands of officials (curatores aquarum) and technicians service it. Water runs directly to the villas of the wealthy. Private homes of the middle class, and the insulae of the poor, mostly use the services of a public water-house. Only a few insulae, and almost no small homes, have direct water, and if they do, only to the ground floor. By far the biggest consumers of water are the baths, which send oceans of used water coursing through the city and thus cleanse its public latrines. Romans are accustomed to sitting on public toilets and chatting as if nothing were going on. They may watch entertainers, or gossip among themselves. Armies of slaves exist for the purpose of keeping clean the latrines and those who use them. Meanwhile, technicians like Scipio Aquifer exist in a hidden economy. Officially, they maintain the pipes (both above ground and buried, as well as cisterns). These pipes may be free-flowing (shut off or on) or regulated (factory-stamped for pressure and flow ratings). Commercial clients can purchase huge volumes of water by the month. Meanwhile, all sorts of thievery goes on. Scipio may allow a valve to carry more than it’s rated for, and receive a bribe. He may even help thieves puncture pipes underground so they siphon off large quantities which they then sell privately at rates lower than those of the municipium, on which the emperor’s administration receives taxes. This would explain why a man like this Scipio is in great demand, and under a lot of scrutiny, by a lot of people. Scipio the Waterman leads you through a series of underground cisterns and water-caverns that amaze you. Some are huge. Some have ceiling vaults over 100 feet above the floor where you stand. Your voice echoes as you whisper with Darwin while Scipio moves ahead like a ghostly wraith and the light of his guttering torch casts eerie shadows on the rippling water in its nearby channel. In one or two places you hold your noses at the methane stench. This is a tributary to the Cloaca Maxima, the Great Sewer, which was built in the early Republic. Since primordial times, the sewage and rain runoff of the hills east of the Tiber have run down into what one day would be the Roman Forum. This area was therefore very marshy and useless for cultivation, and it was used for hunting, fishing, and burial purposes. Under the early Republic, the water-flow (the Roman Forum being some distance northwest of where you are, under the Capitoline Hill) was contained in a channel built of stone. Eventually it was covered over with slabs of travertine, and thus the newly dry area became prime real estate for expensive homes, monuments, and tombs. In fact, in the early Republic it out-Appianed the Appian Way for the density and number of its structures. You won’t see any of the foul-smelling miles of underground burial caverns outside the city, with their rotting corpses in barely plastered burial vaults. Something tells you the early Christians did not tarry there much, except perhaps in the midst of the worst persecutions, which came on and off over several centuries. The Christians spent far more time not being persecuted than they spent being persecuted, which almost begs the question: why were they so hated and feared? You still don’t know. Maybe you are too close to the trees to see the forest. You can guess that it’s a combination of ignorance, scapegoating, and maybe the same sort of blind prejudice one finds in anti-Semitism. Maybe in part it was a form of anti-Semitism, since the Christians were seen as an aberrant cult of the Jews. But you suspect it was something more than all of this. Wandering underground, in these mysterious regions that are part practical and part cult-related, you have time for inspired thinking. Perhaps, you reason, the polytheists exhausted their imagination of these chthonic and sky myths. Perhaps the thing about Christianity that scared the establishment was that it was a spiritual universe with the strength and universality, the appeal and the resolute monotheistic sanctity, that most resembled the pietas of the core ancient Roman belief system. It therefore showed the most promise of shoveling the old religion into the dustbin of history.
The priesthoods of Rome were well aware of the bad ju-ju of building on consecrated burial ground, and all the temples in the area have had a round the clock industry for the past 1,000 years in purifying it ritually, appeasing the ghosts of the dead who wander around the Forum (including that of Julius Caesar), and protecting the Genius Loci of the Deified Goddess Roma from the bad luck associated with this business of using a cemetery for a public forum. That’s all a lot of hullabaloo going on a mile or more from here, but good to understand as you slosh through ventilated sewer shafts which would otherwise explode from Scipio’s torch, or give you delusional migraines before suffocating you. Don’t worry, it’s all superbly engineered and has worked flawlessly for centuries. Scipio takes you under a good portion of the city. You even pass through ancient temples that lie buried here, and were uncovered by later Roman engineers. If you wish, you can light a candle or mumble a prayer to some Oscan or Sabellian god whose age-worn face stares out of a crumbling wall niche.
Scipio brings you to another mithraeum under the Baths of Trajan. You are quite close now to the Colosseum and halfway across the city. You hear the thunder of an underground river. At first you don’t know what it is—it sounds like a 16-lane freeway overhead with nothing but truck traffic in modern times, or an airport with huge jets constantly thundering in and out. Meanwhile, the very bricks and stones in the walls shiver all around you. As you draw closer to the baths, you see water dribbling out of the stone walls, and you worry about the pressure, but Scipio seems unconcerned. Scipio passes you off to a tall, thin man with blond hair and a facial tic, named Bodo. He’s a German enslaved from a tribe far to the north in what will one day be Aachen. He has an iron slave ring around his neck, and is missing an eye and a hand from long-ago escape attempts. He is also missing part of his tongue for the same reason, and cannot talk properly. Evidently he has resigned himself to his fate. It’s clear: if he misbehaves one more time, he will be sent to work in the public toilets, scrubbing people’s behinds all day with a sponge on a brush. Instead, he labors in the hypocaust system under the baths. It’s hot work but it’s dry and clean, and he gets all the free baths he wants—during the hour when slaves are allowed to bathe. He has enough to eat, from what you can gather from his limited conversation, and even has a slave girlfriend whom he secretly meets near the vestibula each night after closing time.
Bodo carries a torch and walks very rapidly, almost like a man obsessed, in rigid strides. He is slightly bent over, and only after a while do you see the scars along his spine where he was lashed with the cat o’ nine tails, probably causing neural damage. It’s very hot and dry in these baking halls under the baths. All day long not far from here, slaves keep throwing logs into the brick ovens to make the water boil and heat the walls. There are clay pipes throughout the walls, to lighten the burden on the supports, and to conduct steamy air. As you recall from the Villa Priscus, the floors in the caldarium are so hot that people have to rent wooden clogs so as not to burn their feet on the stones.
You are glad to pass through the fringes of the hypocausts of the Baths of Trajan and into a cooler area of more underground waters. Bodo wishes you well and sends you off alone, with close instructions, so that you walk along underground walkways carrying your torches. The pounding of the waters lessens, and it’s quiet and relatively clean here. There is moss growing on ancient cracked mosaic floors, and you realize you are in some abandoned and buried villa probably dating to the early Republic. You see mosaics and altars depicting the Manes, or spirits of the dead, who haunt these corridors. Drabs of light from overhead shafts filter in by day, but now you feel only gusts of cool night air. Again you remember that night of rain, thunder, and lightning with Priscillus at the Villa Priscus. You recall that he hungry and lonely spirits of the unburied dead wander about for eternity as lemuri or the even more malicious larvae. There are no recent burials, since it’s forbidden to inter the dead in the city limits. All the catacombs are outside. That’s why the Appian Way is lined with tombs of the wealthy. The Ostian Way, too, is lined by cities of the dead. The dead reverently are either cremated and inurned in colombaria (‘dovecotes’), or entombed, with much ceremony, including putting a coin (obulus Carontis) in the mouth to pay the boatman Charon who ferries the dead across into the other world. The ‘good’ families take a wax impression (imago) that they store in the family shrine in the house. The custom of such death masks is still practiced in Europe and the Americas into the late 1800s and beyond (you’ve seen one of Abraham Lincoln, for example).
It isn’t safe for you to go any further, so a sympathetic Christian doorkeeper of an insula on the low-lying valley of Subura. That’s were many of the city’s nearly 50,000 insulae are located. The rule of thumb is much the same as in modern cities: the wealthier you are, the higher up in the hills of the city you live; that way you enjoy the view, the fresher air, and the relative safety. The poorer you are, the lower down you live in crowded tenements. You emerge into a human warehouse of brick walls, brick columns, brick archways, and part travertine, part mosaic floors called the Habitatio Ardeae (‘Dwelling of the Heron’). It’s like a modern developer some colorless housing project ‘Happy Acres’ or ‘Bella Vista’ when it’s really just a dump. This place reminds you immediately of the most dreadful city slums you have ever seen. It doesn’t help that it has no electricity or running water. They do have two lame, elderly slave men (long-ago gladiators, judging by bold but faded tattoos on flaccid arms) who hobble constantly through the maze of corridors and colonnades refilling the cheap little clay oil lamps that gutter in every draft on brick wall shelves. They also clean waste that has been left on the stairs, and they call the police (urban cohorts) several times a day to chase gangs of criminals away. The ceilings are low, because the lower they build each floor, the more floors they can squeeze in before the building collapses. This building has five stories; some have six. You climb endless winding stairs that smell of urine and wine vomit. There is a constant drum roll of yelling, crying, doors slamming, screaming, and musical cacophony. You smell a hundred dangerous little floor braziers on which a family might warm some rice or vegetables, risking the danger of being asphyxiated. The air is heavy with odors of broccoli, onions, and garlic, for the Romans are great eaters of vegetables. Finally you reach the highest floor, where the cheapest, smallest, and most transitory rents are. The only saving graces here are that (1) there are no noisy tenants above you, only cooing pigeons and scuttling rats; and (2) you get a nice wafting breeze of fresh air through the cracks in the ceiling (just hope it doesn’t rain). You almost have to bend your head in the barrel-vaulted corridors, and you are shocked when one of the slaves unlocks your wooden door and lets you into a windowless little room with a beam ceiling from which loose straw constantly falls as birds walk on top. The walls are of battered brick, probably reused at least once or twice from previously collapsed buildings, with a ghostly coat of whitewash that looks like a diagram of a kidney. There are plain wooden benches for you to sleep or eat on, and you are welcome to bring your own sack of straw for a mattress. There is a small wooden table, but it’s missing a leg and won’t stand up straight. You are tired, and glad to be able to bolt yourselves into this miserable sty that smells of last month’s spilled vegetable soup. There is an underlying foul, mildewy smell that seems to be part of the very bricks and the slate floor. Can you go home now? God, this is all so awful.
"Don’t worry, we’ll set it all right with Ulpian tomorrow. I can’t wait to soak in his marble baths and pop a few juicy grapes in my mouth."
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